Software Licenses

I have been a subscriber to Crynwr
Software's Free Software Business mailing list for years. It is an
open discussion forum for people in the free-software business.
Other well-known members include Bob Young, Brian Behlendorf and
Tim O'Reilly.

A discussion is still currently going on, which inspired this
post to our news site. The title is Licenses vs. public
domain. You will see the typical GPL vs. BSD license
issue being discussed, although Brian Behlendorf posted something I
hadn't previously thought about. His point, using Apache as an
example which is under the BSD license, is the fact that the
license, while allowing a proprietary fork in the code, does not
allow the use of the Apache name.

For something new to the market, this probably doesn't
matter. But, once your product is established, the name becomes
very important. Having a web server that works like Apache is much
less important than having a web server you can call Apache in
today's market.

A second interesting issue that was raised in this same
discussion is how the licensing of Perl made it possible for Perl
(and Python) support to be added to the Microsoft Visual suite.
Before you panic, this is not MS-Perl; it is a development
environment.

Rather than re-hash the discussion, check out the archive.
You can read it and even join the FSB list by visiting
www.crynwr.com/fsb/.
If you are interested in open licensing issues, it is well worth
reading.